This album had a few things going for it before I even put it on the player. Firstly it was released by Black Widow, one of my favourite labels, and I just loved the artwork, which reminded me a great deal of the music of the Seventies. This is the second full-length album from the guys (and at 47 minutes is 12 minutes longer than their last album), and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Lawry and drummer Darin McCloskey have been joined by Brian J Anthony on mellotron. Note the important distinction there: he doesn’t play keyboards plural, but mellotron singular. That is already enough to get many proghead’s pulses racing, as if just one instrument was seen as being key to the Seventies prog sound then that would be it.
There are only five songs, but three of them stretch out to more than ten minutes, so I settled back to enjoy an album that promised to bring together influences from the likes of Black Sabbath, Cathedral, Reverend Bizarre, Camel, King Crimson, Black Widow, Ancestors, Electric Wizard and Atomic Rooster. Well, maybe not quite. There are parts of this album that do gel together very well, but there are others where it is way too workmanlike. The vocals just aren’t powerful enough, and while the guitar sound is beautifully rich and dramatic, with some nice mellotron overlays, there just isn’t enough going on to fully maintain my interest. When I look at Umur’s review on MMA of their previous album he says “the music is rather dull though and lacks power and conviction. The songs aren’t especially memorable either. There’s nothing really bad here either though, the material just comes off mediocre.”. Now I haven’t heard that album, but pretty much can be said for this one. It is okay, but really nothing more than that.
www.blackwidow.it
